I'm hooked out

Running out of patience with myself and our content-mad landscape.

Last night I was in the back of an Uber on my way home after a big day. I had a face full of makeup from an earlier photo shoot and was the unique sort of tired that comes from holding your body and face in weird positions for longer than is normal. Scrolling mindlessly to pass the time, I was served another ad for a social media tool I’ve had my eye on. This one researches your niche, tells you exactly what content to create, then edits your video for ‘maximum virality’ in one click.

It was on sale at the bargain basement price of $300 AUD per annum. Frustrated at my progress on social media (or lack thereof), I let out a sigh that was loud enough to concern my driver, then begrudgingly added to cart.

I figure: My ideas aren’t good enough. My hooks aren’t strong enough. I can’t retain people’s attention when I ‘yap’. And my editing skills leave a fair bit to be desired. So perhaps I should just admit defeat and pay to play - by outsourcing my creativity to the people (AI) who clearly know what they’re doing.

Call it self-preservation or biology, but at this point my car sickness kicked in and I had no choice but to break my eyes from the screen and look out the window. We were crossing the Swan River, and I looked out and thought… that river feels like my creative life right now. Like if I jumped out the window, I could drown in a sea (river) of hooks, retention rates and metrics.

It’s a conundrum for a person with a public profile, or - to be honest - any sort of personal brand or business (or both). Because business 101 tells us we need to know how to market and the smartest way to do that these days is via social media.

It’s not good enough to be a great artist, architect or author… we now have to be a social media savant in order to sell our wares.

So we hit LinkedIn with a professional tone, Insta or TikTok to show off our ‘personalities’, and if we’re lucky, somewhere like this platform in order to dive a tiny bit deeper into our (hopefully somewhat original) thoughts and ideas. We niche, pillar and post, trying desperately to keep our businesses afloat while running a secondary full-time job - the job of marketing on social media. For youthful digital natives this may not be a stretch, but for Duncan the dentist in Duncraig? It’s a different story. And I know this, because even with 20 years’ experience in media, I’m struggling on socials.

The antidote is to take out a newspaper Ad very few people read, print out flyers which are no good for the environment or I suppose go to networking events which make the vast majority of us cringe. So instead, we invest time learning how to ‘stop the scroll’, ‘yap’ and crush as much ‘value’ as humanly possible into as microscopic a time as we can in the vain hope we can keep people’s attention past the average of eight seconds.

And if we can crack it, the rewards are real. The people doing social media best are - in no uncertain terms - making a fortune. They’re building multi-million-dollar businesses and wielding more power than our largest media outlets, sometimes combined. As such, my entire feed is full of people telling me how to better commoditise other people’s attention. Edit like this, yap like that, post like them.

Then, I find myself on Zoom with a world-leading neuroscientist telling me that the companies who own our attention are getting very, very rich off of our penchant for the infinite scroll, while we get very, very mad at ourselves for not being able to put our phones down.

With my motion sickness equalised, I return to the cart and instead hit the ‘X’ to get me out. Because - while I want to win - I’m not sure I’m ready to outsource my creativity just yet. And, to pay (more than I already have, which is a lot) to play.

I don’t have the answers here. I am totally reliant on building some semblance of a personal brand and having a ‘following’ - that’s how I get to publish books and host TV shows and get gifted lovely things on occasion. All I know is that I’m a bit hooked out, and a little scared of what comes next as more and more AI-driven content floods our feeds. I also know that I’m grateful to have creative skills and passions - ones that light me up much brighter than the glow of my iPhone.

So I’ll keep straddling, somewhere between the tools of the new world and the grunt of the old one. For now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Til next time…

Casey x

P.S. If you want to follow along my haphazard journey, you can do that below.

P.P.S. If you feel like being a low-key hero today, why not pre-order my new book More? If you like this, you’ll love that. All links here: https://linktr.ee/morecaseyberos